10. Maddox #2
I'm naked already. I undressed at my stall, which is a thing I never do. I walked across the locker room naked because I didn't care. The locker room is empty. The rink is empty. The Zamboni is running somewhere else in the building. Nobody is walking in.
I step under the water behind him.
I put a hand on his hip.
He doesn't jump. He's been waiting for the hand. His body leans back into my body, not hard, a fraction, enough for me to feel the line of him from shoulder to thigh along the front of me.
My cock is hard against the small of his back.
I put my mouth on the side of his neck and I say, very quiet, “Keep it quiet, sweetheart. There's still guys in the building.”
“Yes.”
“Good boy.”
His skin goes a degree hotter where my mouth is. That's a thing I didn't know skin could do.
I pump soap from the wall dispenser into my hand.
Cheap soap. Institutional. It smells like any locker room in any rink in any city.
I'm going to put this cheap institutional soap on him.
He's going to walk out of here and go to lunch with Paul.
The smell of this soap will be on him. Paul will sit across from him at a table and smell the soap and see a rookie who showered at the rink.
Paul won't know that the smell of cheap institutional rink soap is going to mean I owned your son's body this afternoon for the rest of my life.
I put the soap on his shoulders.
I spread it with my hands.
I'm not gentle. Gentle isn't what I'm here for.
My hands are big and I use them like hands, not like a washcloth.
I run them along the line of his traps, down his biceps, up again, around his collarbones.
I find the two small moles on his left shoulder I noticed on Friday.
I put my thumb over the upper one and press and hold.
“Breathe,” I say.
He breathes.
His chest goes under my palm when I slide my hand down around the front of him.
I find the flat of his sternum. His ribs.
The small divot at the base of his throat.
I wash him with the whole weight of my hand.
Every pass is a mark I'm leaving on him.
He's going to walk out of this stall with the feel of my hands all over his skin.
My other hand comes around the front and finds his nipple.
I put my thumb over it.
I drag my thumb across it once.
He makes a sound.
He cuts the sound in half in his throat. He remembers. Quiet. The building. I slide my palm off his chest and up to his mouth, and I put two fingers against his lips.
“Open.”
He opens.
I put the fingers in his mouth.
His tongue is hot. His mouth closes over my fingers. He sucks once on instinct. His throat works. His whole body pushes back against mine. My cock jumps against the small of his back.
“There it is,” I say at his ear. “There you are.”
My hands continue to map him.
I wash his ribs. His flanks. The line of his waist. I wash his hips.
I run my palm flat over his stomach and feel it tighten in small jumps under my hand.
I wash his thighs, front and inside. I crouch behind him and wash the backs of his knees, the backs of his thighs, the line where his ass meets his thighs.
He's holding the tile with both hands now.
His back is bowed. Water hits his neck and runs down his sides in sheets.
I stand up.
I kiss the back of his neck.
Then I get to the part I've been saving.
I pump more soap. I run my hand down the crease of his ass. The heel of my hand first, then my fingers. He gasps against the tile. His fingers scratch at the grout. I put my soapy fingers between his cheeks and drag the pad of my index finger over his hole, light, once, just to say I'm here.
He whimpers.
“Shh.”
He bites the inside of his forearm.
I smile at his neck.
“Good. Good boy.”
I push the tip of my finger in a quarter inch.
No further. I don't have prep. I don't have patience to find any.
I want him to know what my finger feels like.
I want him to feel me there and think about me there in his bed tonight and think about me there at lunch with his father and think about me there at every meal and every skate and every fucking hour until he gets to see me next.
I pull my finger out.
I reach around the front of him.
I take his cock in my hand.
He's hard and slick and leaking. The water makes him slicker. I've had this fist around him in my head for three days and now I've got him in it for real. I stroke once, slow, full length. He makes a small sound at the tile. He buries his face in his arm to keep it in his chest.
“Who told you you could be this hard?”
“You.”
“I did.”
My thumb drags along the crease.
“Yes.”
“Tell me whose hand this is.”
“Yours.”
My fist squeezes at the base of him.
“Tell me whose cock this is.”
“Yours.”
“Good.”
I work him slow. My other hand is back on him, soapy, the thumb along the crease, pressing and not pushing.
I've got a thumb over his hole, a fist on his cock, my mouth on his ear.
I'm whispering filth at him he's never going to unhear.
Look at you. Look how wet you are for me.
You gonna come for me in a shower stall at your dad's rink, sweetheart.
You gonna come all over my fist right here.
He's nodding against the tile. Nodding and nodding.
I speed the fist up. I let my thumb breach him a second time, just a press at the tip. He comes.
He comes hard into my hand, biting down on his own arm.
The sound he makes is almost nothing. I feel it come through his whole body because his whole body is against mine.
The water takes what my fist doesn't hold.
He's shaking. I hold him through it. The water keeps running.
I tighten my grip to ride the last of it out.
He sags.
I hold him up.
“Good boy.”
“Maddox?”
His forehead stays pressed to the tile.
“Yeah?”
“I…”
“Yeah. I know.”
I wait. I let him get his breath. His forehead is on the tile.
The water is the only sound. I reach past him and pump a handful of soap and I wash my hand, and then I wash him again where he came on himself, clinical this time, fast, because we are on a clock.
The hot water is still going. The steam is thick.
Then I turn him around.
“On your knees.”
He goes down without waiting for me to make it an order a second time. He kneels on the tile with the water running down the back of his head and his eyes come up to me and his mouth opens a little, because he has learned in three days what his mouth is for when he is on his knees and I'm over him.
“Hand on the base. Yes?”
“Yes.”
I cup the back of his skull.
“Use your throat like I showed you Friday.”
“Yes.”
My fingers tighten in his hair.
“Keep it quiet. Someone could still walk in.”
“Yes.”
I put my hand in his wet hair.
I guide him onto me.
He's better than he was on Friday. His mouth opens wider.
His tongue knows where to go. His hand is steady on the base of me.
He looks up at me once and I almost lose the plot, because his eyes in this light under this water are a green I don't have names for, and his mouth is full of me and he is looking at me like he is going to put his whole life in my hand if I let him.
I don't let him.
Not yet.
I fuck his mouth like I fucked his throat on Friday.
Slow, then less slow. My hand is in his hair and I use that to control his movements.
Water runs down my arms. His eyes stream.
His chin streams. He doesn't pull back. He doesn't tap.
He does what I taught him to do. He's a good student.
He's my good student. The sentence is in my head now in a way it wasn't before. Mine mine mine.
“Fuck, Theo.”
“Mm.”
“Look at you.”
I'm not going to last. I didn't come Saturday. I didn't come Sunday. I came in his mouth Friday and nowhere since. I've been saving. I'm going to give him all of it.
“I'm going to come down your throat, sweetheart. You swallow. All of it. You walk into lunch with your dad with my come in your stomach.”
His throat works. His hand tightens at the base. His eyes don't leave mine.
“Good fucking boy.”
I come.
I come in his mouth. The water takes what his mouth can't hold. His throat is working at the base of me. He's swallowing. I'm leaning against the tile with one hand because my knees are doing a thing my knees haven't done in a decade. I say it again because I want him to hear it.
“Good boy.”
He sits back on his heels.
Water runs over his face. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. His mouth is swollen. He's going to have to do something about the mouth before lunch with his father. I will tell him. I will tell him how to hold it.
I pull him up.
I kiss him.
I kiss him hard. I taste myself in his mouth and I don't care.
He tastes me in his mouth and doesn't care.
He puts his hands flat on my chest and he kisses me back, and I think, in the part of my head that is still working, Phoenix was right.
The exit is closed. There is no going back through that door.
I pull off.
I put my mouth at his ear.
“You smell like my soap. You smell like my hands. You taste like me in your mouth. You feel me in your body. You're gonna carry this to lunch. You understand me?”
“Yes.”
My mouth drags along his jaw.
“You understand who you belong to this week?”
“Yes.”
My teeth graze his earlobe.
“Say it.”
“You.”
“Good.”
I turn off the water.
We dress in silence. He dresses at his stall. I dress at mine. We don't meet in the middle of the room. He finishes first. He picks up his bag. He looks at me from his stall, for just a second. I nod.
He nods back.
He walks to the door.
At the door he stops. He doesn't turn.
“Maddox?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Then he is gone.
I sit down on the bench in my half-tied sneakers.
I laugh.
It isn't a laugh. It's the shape a laugh takes when a man has just realized the ground under him is going to give. He's going to fall. On the way down he's happier than he's been in a decade.
I put my face in my hands.
I'm smiling into my palms.
This is about Paul, I tell myself.
I don't even bother waiting for the sentence to land. It doesn't. It hasn't in a week.